Best way to invest £200,000.

EthicsGradient

gascar said:

I hoped for a more intelligent reply.  It's easy to sneer from a position of not knowing, not understanding, or  having a preconceived idea you won't challenge, or making a living out of being lazy.

You do know some make a living out of it?

...

I'm a retired ol bloke but I could write a program to do that in several minutes..

--

Ok, having got that out of the way, is there an "instrument" that does that for me? All that I can find,  buy stocks and hope for the best, or buy dividend stocks which promise a percentage - as long as the base price doesn't fall. ([Ahem eg Rio Tinto, down 18% in 6 months when many were doing rather well.])

There should be, if I as an ol bloke can beat the building societies in one week and inflation in two, with ease. (See previous post)

We are in the world run by  AI, not old men in pin striped suits who like to sneer and tell you you don't understand.

Consider this: if you think you could write a program to do it in several minutes, have you wondered why all the other people have left writing the program to you, rather than do it themselves and reap all the rewards? Why would they produce this instrument, and then give it to you to make the profits?

Your problem is that you're looking at candles that are produced after a week. That nice, easy-to-see colour change is only decided in retrospect. You're not looking at the detail of the variation during the week, which would be when you'd have to decide what to do. Your use of stop-losses and stop-limits depends on the broker reacting quickly enough, and the market not moving too fast. Many people find they're doing OK, until the broker is too slow. If you borrow money to do it all, it can end in disaster. For a thread started by someone who wanted "safest", it's totally the wrong direction to advise. Start a separate thread if you want to talk high-risk trading with people.

Gary1984

Was there not another thread here where someone talks about losing £40k on a leveraged bet because the stop loss didn't activate? Fair play to them for talking about it here, I imagine most of the 80% stay quiet.

This stuff is really playing with fire. If it's all so easy why are 80% of people losing money on it. Are you really one of the best 20%, or is it mostly just luck and backing the right horse at the right time?

Markets have drifted up recently so maybe everyone can make money out of this in a benign market. When a downturn comes and the stop loss fails it may be different.

Albermarle

Gary1984 said:

Was there not another thread here where someone talks about losing £40k on a leveraged bet because the stop loss didn't activate? Fair play to them for talking about it here, I imagine most of the 80% stay quiet.

This stuff is really playing with fire. If it's all so easy why are 80% of people losing money on it. Are you really one of the best 20%, or is it mostly just luck and backing the right horse at the right time?

Markets have drifted up recently so maybe everyone can make money out of this in a benign market. When a downturn comes and the stop loss fails it may be different.

Yes there was a thread about that. I think they wanted to sue the trading platform.
As probably >95% of regular forum users are boring old buy and hold investors, happy with not having an 80% chance of losing, then I think these day trader types are on the wrong forum . They should be chasing meme stocks on Reddit.

gascar

That's aload of rubbish comments, really. Mass ignorance and inability to read!

I didn't recommend the OP to use the stock market at all, so all the trolls who want to repeat that I did, need to grow up and stop making things up. I asked about managed funds, in effect

Some people do write programs, or buy them, to invest and make money, like the banks do. It works.

That's in effect what the stock exchange software is doing. If you don't understand - well just think about it more.

What I suggeted just as illustration also works, but isn't very efficient.

"Your problem is that you're looking at candles that are produced after a week. That nice, easy-to-see colour change is only decided in retrospect. You're not looking at the detail of the variation duri...."

No, YOUR problem is that you've written rubbish because you don't have a clue. The candles I showed are for illustration.

Someone watching the situation would have 1 minute candles - 'finer timescale' I think I wrote. Are you really trying to suggest that the stock market might collapse in that time? Fantasy. If it did, the world would have bigger problems.

Here's the same picture, with the parts shown where you'd own the stock. Notice I've allowed a week to notice the price changing and excluded that from rises, included that week for falls.  Obviously you wouldn't wait a week. You would in practice not do anything where where there was negligible price change whether up or down. You can argue the toss over an edge here or there.

Do all the height changes captures add up to a bigger height than overall ? Yes. If you "shorted" the stock when you had a not-green period, that would add on to your gain as well.

Not very difficult, but if you don't understand, stay away from stocks, period. You're one of the 80% majority. Or do some learning

No it isn't like playing with fire, no similarity at all. "Investing" is buying stock, and selling it when you want to, This is the same only more fequently.

"Your broker might be too slow" - Jeez, are you from the 1960's? Have you used a stock broker recently? I guess not. You do it online. For  large cap liquid institutions  it takes millliseconds. You can use the phone network too.

I suppose I am one of the better 20%, but there are many better than me, who are really good at it and it's those I would like to employ. You have to be fairly bright, and numerate. Any accountant, say, wouldn't have a problem. I have academic quals which I imagine would put me in the top 20% but I don't think that's necessary. I'm retired but still teach a bit of A level maths as a volunteer, as a hobby. It's surprising how poor some are.

Someone there is talking about stop sale orders failing as though it's something he's just thought up as he's clever. No, it's well covered, there are plenty of ways to deal with that, look it up.

Stop talking about horse races, that's idiotic.

For straightforward investing, you put your money on a "horse" which is running fast/est already, and move it to another nag if necessary. Nothing like a horse race. You stop the race whenever you like. And it's not a race - all ordinary investors can be on the same horse

I live near a busy road. If you walk across the road you'd have probably an 80% chance of getting  hurt.

That's what most people do with their money.

Those people should stay at home and never go out.

However, for the 20% who have learned to look both ways, it's not an issue.

"Markets have drifted up recently so maybe everyone can make money out of this in a benign market."

Also nonsense. The worst is a benign market, you'd put the money in a fixed interest account. The rest of the time you use it to gain.

On 6th  of this month. A stock for which the co  had had poor results, dropped as expected. It was well publicised - redundancies,  iirc.

I looked, and it was falling, so I "went short" at $91 and closed at  $84.5. It's not complicated, it's like you borrow the shares when they're high, sell them, and replace them when the price has fallen.

The price fell over about 4 hours.

So using 10k at x5 I gained  (50k/91) x (91 -84.5) = 3571 , or would have if I'd opened with the full amount in one go. Actually I held my maximum  exposure to about £200 and the allocation grew over half an hour or so. It was over 3k.

Look it up if you don't believe me. That was unusual, but you can imagine that if you sometimes get 30% in 4 hours, you don't need to use all of the fund you have, at any one time, which wipes out all the silly objections above even if they were valid.

If you lot would get yourselves a trading account and try it, with a "demo" account, you'd find out, and stop filling the forum with your rubbish. You might even make some  money, but you'd have to be able to multiply, and that. If you can't , best if you keep quiet.

I repeat, in case you'd got yourself confused, i am not suggesting the OP dabbles in the stock market, but that he find somene to do it for him.

EthicsGradient

@gascar, you don';t understand graphs, or time. You say you'd allow a week to decide if the price has changed from rising or falling. With the colours you've imposed, with just a single red or blue candle inside the other colour not changing the ownership, that would be 2 weeks - each candle shows a rise or fall from the beginning of one week to the end of it, so to be able to ignore a single candle, you need to wait until the end of the second week to know if it's the longer trend. But that means the colours you've imposed are all out, by a week - you don't change ownership until the end of the second week, when you know it's a lasting trend. 

If this is your idea of having the ability to write programs to get easy money, don't bother. You haven't properly defined what you'd want to do.

Stop calling members "trolls". It's against the rules. And, again, this thread is about finding a safe method; you are claiming there's a get-rich-quick way, if only you can find someone to try and time the market on their behalf. This is not how the stock market has turned out. Start your own thread for your scheme.

booneruk

gascar said:

That's aload of rubbish comments, really. Mass ignorance and inability to read!

TLDR; Do you really expect us all to wade through that? Without having done so, do you really believe there's a fail safe set of rules you can employ to beat the stock market? Why put so much time into lengthy posts like that if your time would be better spent leveraging yourself up to the eyeballs and investing into your 'can't fail' system?

And I do wonder why no one in Wall Street has caught onto this. Maybe go and consult for them?